Calmer Capacity: Use Automation and AI to Lighten Your Client Load

You've built a thoughtful, high touch service business. Your work gets results, but the delivery, It's getting heavy. Too many moving parts, too much manual oversights, and way too many pings from Zapier. You want more margin, more space in your day, more predictable service delivery, and more capacity to take on great fit clients without cloning yourself. But most of the advice on scaling either points you towards hiring a big team or flattening your services into a cookie cutter course.

And the AI advice out there? Well, it feels spammy. What if the solution wasn't replacing your service, but engineering it differently? What if you could take what's already working and build smart systems powered by automation, software, or even AI that made your service delivery smoother, not more complicated. Imagine this.

It's a Tuesday afternoon. You're onboarding a new client, and instead of juggling 12 tabs and rewriting the same email for the fourth time this week, your internal system handles 80% of it automatically. The client gets exactly what they need on time. Your team is calm, and you get to do the strategic human parts of your service that you actually like doing. As a service business owner, you've probably felt the tension between doing work that's deeply human and trying to scale that work without sacrificing your sanity or your standards.

And maybe you've built your fair share of franken systems along the way, duct taping tools together to get the job done. But what if instead of trying to escape your client work, you scaled through it? What if the system itself was the service? Welcome to Calm as the New KPI, the podcast where we challenge default business advice and break down the levers you can pull to build a calmer business that actually works for you. I'm your host, Susan Bowles.

And if that all sounds like magic or maybe just wildly unrealistic, today's episode will give you a fresh perspective. I'm talking with Dylan Kinder, founder and CEO of Datacoz, a custom development agency that helps service based businesses scale by turning their service into a software. We're geeking out about how to know when your business might be ready to turn parts of your service into software, the difference between internal automations and client facing tools, and why you don't have to choose between being a service provider or being a software company. You could be both on your own terms. This episode is part of our series on scaling your client business without ditching clients, and we're tackling two levers of the calmer framework.

Business design by rethinking how you deliver your services and using efficiency to create margins by using software and tech to create those margins and calm in your day to day business. We're told there are only two ways to scale a service business. Option one, hire, build a team, train them, build layers of management, build systems to manage the systems, and congratulations. You've just built a mini agency or a full blown company you don't actually wanna run. Option two, productize everything.

Strip your service down to the essentials. Turn it into a DIY course, a playbook, or some kinds of hands off digital product or group program. But suddenly, the thing that made your service special, the nuance, the customization, the expertise, that's gone. But that's the default. That if you want to scale your revenue, your only choices are to go big or go flat.

And, honestly, that advice just doesn't work for a lot of us because maybe you don't want a team of 10. And maybe your clients don't want a self paced course. Maybe you love delivering your service. You just want it to be lighter, easier, and less reliant on you. So what do you do when the default path to scale doesn't actually align with the business you wanna build?

Well, that's the breaking point. It's the moment when those duct tape systems start falling apart, when client delivery starts feeling like a drag, when your time is eaten up by repetitive admin work that could easily be handled by, well, literally anything or anyone else. It's the moment when you start wondering, isn't there a better way to do this? And that's where tech enters the picture. We have more access to automation, AI, and customizable tools than ever before.

But honestly, it still feels complicated, intimidating, hard to implement, easy to break, and yet it could be the thing that helps you escape that false choice between go big or go one to many. Because done right, tech can help you deliver services that are still high touch and human, just lighter. We're going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors and then we'll be back with Dylan getting nerdy about using software and AI in your service business. So Dylan you help service based businesses think about their businesses as machines. Can you break that down?

What does that actually mean or look like to approach a service business more like an engineer?

When I look at a business, I see all these different functions. There are sales functions. There are finance functions. There are of course, delivery operation functions. I think personally, I'm spending most of my time in those operation functions, really trying to help automate the great service that these service based businesses are delivering and really start to try to think about how to productize it through tech.

So right now people are involved in many of the steps, but more and more, and especially as we'll probably get to later with AI, more and more steps can be handed over to, to computers, machines so that humans can focus on what they're best at. Very creative tasks, high touchpoint, high value type work.

So talk to me about what the common signals are that a service business might be ready to start thinking about turning part of its service into a software.

So there are typically two camps. The first camp will be, they just can't find the tool that does everything they need. And often what we'll see is businesses will create a little Frankenstein, digital Frankenstein, and they'll use some common tool. Maybe just for an example, we could pick a CRM such as HubSpot or GoHighLevel. You know, it's typically not CRMs are working with.

It's it's typically more like order management or task management type platforms, but, but it could be any tool and they can't quite get it to do what they need it to do. So they're using Zapier, maybe they're making automations within the platform. Maybe there's some custom code integrations happening too. But at the end of the day, it's breaking. It's not agile.

It's not flexible enough. And the more that you build on top of these tools, less stable the tools become as well. And I've seen a lot of companies just always getting pinged every day by Zapier error, error, error, or by whatever tool they're using. And I think that's like one great signal that maybe you should kind of take a step back and reassess the system, especially over time, because it's so easy to just add a bandaid quick fix, quick fix. That's what we have to do as business owners every day too, right?

Just to keep things running. But eventually there's a point you have to kind of step back and reassess it and build the correct machine. And the second camp would be that maybe the signs aren't showing yet, but these business owners just feel like there has to be a better way. Some business owners are a little bit more tech inclined than others, and they just really feel like they know they could get more out of tech and that drives them to kind of look. So there may be a little bit ahead of the others, but maybe I guess it's a similar thing.

They just don't feel like they are where they are. We have some clients who, for example, they're just always trying to push the boundary. They're definitely not hitting limitations. They're far ahead of their competitors, but they always want more and they're always pushing farther.

So in this hypothetical business that we're talking about, if somebody wanted to head down the path of using software to scale their client work without just completely running away from client work, we're not talking about replacing client work, but making that client delivery easier. What are some of the first areas that you think they should look at automating or productizing? Or how do you think about that?

Yeah, that's a really great question. I really recommend starting actually with what's working because if you already have a proven tested manual system with very high confidence that can be enhanced with automation, with the right tech, with the right tools. So those are, I think really quick wins and they free up time still. And then maybe the things that aren't working as well, those identify processes that should be kind of focused on before we even look at automating them or creating some tech around them. So that's maybe how I'd approach it.

Start with what's working. Is it streamlined? Is it augmented with tech to the point that it should be? If not, let's go do that. And then we can move on to the rougher areas.

Now, sometimes there is just one area that is so bad that business owners just feel if we could fix this, that it would solve everything. And maybe it's worth paying attention to those, but very often businesses aren't in this state of complete collapse, hopefully. And we can just start one by one on getting things automated piece by piece.

Can you share maybe a real world example of a service business that you've seen successfully turn part of their process or their delivery into a software and kind of talk us through what that transition looked like for them?

Absolutely. Yeah. So maybe one of my favorite examples is a third party DMV service provider. And what they were actually able to do was instead of manually moving between their customers and the DMV, they created a portal that both the DMV ended up in the end signing into. We didn't know if that'd be possible in the beginning.

And then their customers also sign into and through this application that we built, they're able to work with each other. Although both parties don't necessarily know that they're working with this other party, you know, it's an interface. They're working with this third party provider. And previously everything was manual, like thousands of emails back and forth. It was, well, big, big, big task.

They had several team members dedicated to facilitating that. And now just one team member is handling edge cases and keeping the clients on this platform happy.

Can you talk us through kind of the process they had to go through to get from manual process to app that solved all the world's problems for them.

Yeah, absolutely. So it definitely didn't happen overnight. Software as is business is very iterative. We have to experiment piece by piece, see what works and what doesn't work. And in the same way, in the beginning, it didn't even cross our mind that we could potentially have the DMVs just sign into and use these tools themselves.

But in the end, we first just had their team working on it with their customers and that eliminated all this back and forth email and it was incredible. And then we had this idea at some point, you know, maybe we can pull those DMV team members onto the platform and they could use it themselves. And actually, you know, there were some meetings with the government to get this approved and etcetera. And we weren't quite sure, but it ended up working out. So I would say, you know, a lot of times you just start by solving one problem.

And the main problem here was so many back and forth emails. They knew that they could deliver this service faster if they didn't have, because actually the core pain point in this example was that the customers were submitting things wrong. They weren't providing the right information or enough information. And they created this endless back and forth. But if our first thought was that if we could build a solution that prevented errors upfront, so it would validate their information, they submitted it or tried to submit it.

It would tell them this isn't right. Please fix it. It avoided this entire back and forth. That was the core problem. And if we just solved that problem, I think the solution would pay for itself and be the client would be super happy.

But as things go, we get funny ideas to take it a little bit farther, a little bit farther, and the business completely fundamentally changed in the end.

So if somebody who owned a service business is thinking about this, what pieces, what processes, what pieces of information, what should they have built or thought through before thinking about turning it into something more automated or more software like?

So I think first you should have a winning process to begin with. So it doesn't have to be perfect. No process is perfect. And sometimes I have a tendency also as a business owner to really want everything to be perfect. So it doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to work.

Right. Your, it has to be good enough for your customers to get that value they're paying you for. And once you have that, I definitely start looking to automate it. And the, the first places I'm looking, if I'm a non technical business owner, I'm going to look at tools like Zapier. I'm going to look at the no code, low code options available in the system itself that I built on.

So if I'm using, you know, Asana or ClickUp or HubSpot, all of these platforms have some level of no code automation, but at the same time, I would recommend probably hiring someone to help you with this only because it's a deep thing to get into. You're busy running your business and you don't have time to watch all these tutorials, but if it interests you and that's something you enjoy doing, I think you should definitely do that. But I would start there. I would start with what's winning already and how can we make it more automated, more streamlined, remove me and my team from this process.

That makes sense. How do you think about the difference between building kind of internal automation? So software designed to help your business run better for internal purposes versus building client facing software to help you deliver your service at scale?

I actually, I love this question and it's still evolving the way I'm thinking about it and the way I'm talking about it. And I often think that lines are very blurred. Like when does one piece of tech end and the next one begin? It's really often unclear. I think that starting with automating things internally is a good place to do it because there's much lower risk, right?

It's just your team who may be impacted if something goes wrong. But often once you start building things internally, the next natural step is to start pushing them out also externally to your clients. I would recommend probably starting internally. Once you have some success there, it's reliable what you're building, then you can very confidently start building it outwards facing for your clients.

So around the topic of internal and external tools that we can develop, what's your opinion on client portals?

I think this is a very interesting space at the moment with a lot of strong opinions on both sides. You have one camp that I've talked to many business owners. They say their clients definitely don't want another app they have to sign into, or remember the password for. And I definitely understand where they're coming from there. We have the other side who's like all for it.

But I do truly believe, you know, every time we've implemented it, it's worked really well. It's been re it can take time to roll it out, but it typically is well received. Think given the choice, people prefer to have some sort of self-service option, generally speaking. And we found even if the clients refuse to sign in and use it, we see the internal teams using it to more easily find the information that the clients are asking them for via email, which again, it still is very helpful and it solves a problem. And I think when we start to talk about these internal tools, these client portals, we're also fundamentally talking about this underlying machine that is your business.

They're all so intertwined. It's hard to pull them apart when you're digitizing these products, these services, how can you allow your customer to do more without having to interact with you? Because I think that's the future people are for better or worse moving towards expecting. When you're a small business provider, you're competing with giant companies that have a ton of self-service service options. Right?

So your customers are kind of being primed whether they like it overall or not to expect everything fast.

Yeah. I have opinions on both sides of those, but I think I agree with both sides. Like I've had portals for clients where they absolutely don't log in on, they don't use it. And it takes a lot of training when they ask you a one off question and you're like, Hey, that answer's in the portal. Here's the link.

Not going to answer your question directly for you. I'm going to try and train you. It's the same as if you go into a business and you've switched systems and now employees in a business have a self-service option. There is a training component of getting out of the habit of individually answering everybody else's questions one off and training people to self serve. And I think there is definitely an element of training people to self serve.

And also there are always going to be people who refuse to read your documentation, self serve, answer their own questions. They just won't. But I do think from a business owner perspective, having a portal that they have access to, whether they're going to use it or not, and the internal team has access to can be a really effective way of using technology to scale your delivery, particularly around things where you're giving like status updates. So that's one of my favorite use cases is so often we have these standing meetings of let me update you on the status of this project. And it's just literally we're coming here and I'm reading to you from my project management system.

What is happening? Where I think in that case it does a really good job of eliminating unnecessary meeting to build more margin in every Everybody's busy. Everybody has a lot of commitments. Any time that we can do communication in a more proactive, more self serve way, I think the communication gets better and it helps other both, you know, me delivering my services and my clients have a little bit more margin of time because we're not getting on a call to say the things so that I can report to you what I've done or where the project stands. You can go check that out.

If you have a question, it's available to you at any time.

Exactly. Yeah. And just to take it one step farther, if you have that information available in a portal, it is so simple to automate it into an email once a week or once a month or however often it needs to go out. And they don't even have to go to your portal if they don't want to, they don't like it or they just forget that, you

know, people really do. That's one of my favorite things about a lot of the, a lot of the like technology tools that we're using for portals, things like project management tools or the like are starting to allow you to like automatically send notifications at a specific point in time. And I love that feature because it's one of those touch points that the information being received is valuable, but having it be a like a live touch point is not valuable.

Yeah. It's much more efficient for I think many of us to review emails on our own time when it makes sense for our schedules.

Are there any places where you notice people getting tripped up or making mistakes when they start dabbling in either the front facing or the behind the scenes?

Oh yeah. So they can create this Frankenstein very easily, but don't be scared of it. It's part of learning, right? It's natural. It happens to everyone.

It happens to me at times as well, because, you know, it can be hard when there are all these moving parts of the business, your team, your processes, your clients understand a million pieces. It can be hard to always keep that bigger vision in sight. And it's also can be hard for devs to do that too. I think if you hire technical people, they often focus quite deeply on the topic at hand and maybe forget about side effects or things like that. So I think it's common to have these problems as you're building, but the more that you do it, the less of them that you'll see, the less severe there'll be as well.

So I would really recommend not to get discouraged if you wake up one day and realize that everything you've built is, is a mess. It's still better than how it was before. I'm sure. And it can always be, you know, relooked at.

So on the topic of building a Frankenstein, I also am a victim of that sometimes, especially I think when we're trying to get really efficient, really automated in a lot of different areas, you know, you make one tweak someplace and sometimes it's really hard to remember all of the different places that affects that are or like, you know, the downstream effects of the change that you just made and all the places that you need to remember to update things. Do you have a preferred way that you like documenting what you're building so that you can go back to it and say, oh yeah, I changed something here. Here's all the places that I need to remember to go update now.

Yes. So there are a million ways to document what you've built. You know, flow charts, I personally really prefer. And my experience, it works really well with, with non technical and technical users, having something visual. It doesn't have to be complicated, definitely to overthink it.

And that alone is really powerful. So we have this kind of concept in programming called technical debt on encode rot. This is when the code you've written over time, it deteriorates, it becomes unused, it becomes useless. And the same thing will happen to documentation. So that's why I'm a really big fan of keeping documentation very light, very high level, because the truth is you can spend all the time in the world and we're guilty of this before making the most beautiful documentation.

It's it's out of date in a few months because that's the reality of business.

Yeah. I love that. It's something I also struggle with because, know, sometimes your brain moves faster than you can document and there's so many different places that can be impacted. So like you, I like having, you know, a visual representation of like, here's the intention, here's the tools we're using to do this thing, go look there. And then trying to do as much documentation inside tools where the things are happening as possible.

Like, I really loved it when Zapier added the ability to like do documentation inside Zaps was so helpful.

Absolutely.

So AI is something that a lot of folks are talking We're thinking about how we could or should be using it as a tool. What's your take on that?

Yeah, I think that everyone should definitely be taking AI seriously, matter what you're doing in your business. And if you're not using it already, I really recommend using it every day. Relying personally on AI more and more, and my team is relying on it more and more. And I think the tech space is a little bit ahead of, of business at the moment, which is also typical, But I really think this year personally is pivotal for AI. And what I mean for that is I think it's at the point where normal businesses, small businesses, even one man teams will start to one person teams will start to really benefit from it.

Right? There's clear ROI that you can see. And maybe just to tell you in the past, it took a lot more data to get a good result. It took a lot more experimentation, training, of course, time, money, resources, and the result was less clear. There's a chance it could work.

There's a chance it won't work. And then there's always the scale of, will it be good enough to justify this cost and who determines good enough? So I think now good enough is generally quite achievable. And I would really recommend that business owners use it for brainstorming. Number one, if they're not already doing it's an incredible brainstorming buddy to have these large language models.

Just expands the possibility of ideas that you can play with. So if you're trying to think of content topics to make maybe how to approach tricky client situations, there are so many use cases for, for these large language models at the moment. We're really starting to use them more and more in parts of the automation previously, where we had to put in a human input or a human verification or human oversight. These points now more and more, we can ask AI to verify things, to check things for us. And even if, even if we still need a human to do it, it can do a pre verification.

So it can highlight even the parts that it suspects may be wrong for us and just draw our attention to those places. So it's a really exciting time for AI.

How do you evaluate when building into AI makes sense versus where it makes sense to just stick with something, a simpler automation?

I think it comes a little bit with intuition. The more that you use it, the more you realize like its strengths and its weaknesses. Right. I am not a big fan of letting it loose. I really still prefer keeping humans in the loop, right.

At least for a verification process, but it can do a lot of very repetitive, tedious or manual tasks, especially on research, like gathering data, gathering information. And that's where I'm really starting to see it shine. So for example, a great solution recently that we've implemented, it can go to different web pages about a company, research it, pull pain points that these businesses may be facing based on their website, their industry, very basic, simple data, and that can create like more tailored touch points or strategies to market directly to them. And previously this was done manually. And as you can imagine, it takes a ton of time to do that.

And now it's just very fast. So it's a great researcher, a great data gatherer, and I think that's a very strong place for it right now where you're going to have very high success rates when you try to implement it in that category.

Yeah, I agree. I am using it a lot for not necessarily like research, but very specific solutions to things. I know that there is an answer to this thing. It's not in the documentation for whatever it is that I'm looking at. Help me.

Absolutely.

And it's been very effective there. Yeah. What are some of the mistakes that you see people making when they start trying to incorporate AI? You know, we're all saying this is something we should learn, something we should be incorporating. Where do people get tripped up though?

So I think it's very important to not build a process where the AI has full reign or control. I think, as I mentioned earlier, it's very important still to keep humans in the loop, especially if it's something that's going to be pushed out to your clients, to the external world, but it can still compile, potential email copy that a human goes in and refines. Right. Or at least at a minimum verifies that it's sane. It makes sense.

When you're designing AI, you should definitely think about it with controls. Think about what can go wrong and design it in a way where the human's still at the end of the day, pressing the buttons and approving whatever it's coming up with.

Agreed. And also please, if you're listening, do not use this for cold emailing people. I don't know about you, but I have gotten just completely inundated with cold pitches in the last, I don't know, six weeks. It's just completely ramped up, and it feels like it's because people are using AI to write some really horrible, cold emails.

Yeah. I'm afraid that's also a case here. And I think right now, you know, it's still in its infancy. It's coming out. We're still trying to figure out how to use it, how it can work, what it can do.

But I definitely agree. We don't need more spam.

I think it's interesting because, you know, like spam wasn't really a thing before we came up with email and it took a while after email existed for people to realize they could harness this tool to spam people. And it's interesting because I think we are kind of seeing the same thing happening with AI in that originally the people that were starting to use this were very technical people or people who are very early adopters. And now that it's starting to get a little bit more mass adoption, we are seeing it used to perpetrate junk stuff. So what's your favorite way to make your own work calmer? We've been talking a lot about technology, but in your own work, what do you lean on to help make your own work calmer?

So I'm leaning a lot these days into, funny enough automation and I'm experimenting a lot with AI. Maybe there's a reason I wasn't talking about AI a year ago with my clients, maybe, you know, just, we were discussing it, the future, what it could be, but I wasn't taking it as a serious solution just a year ago because I'm working primarily with, absolutely. Yeah. And I'm working primarily with small and medium businesses. They don't have like this, this huge budget to run an experiment that doesn't work out.

In that same light, I want to be very confident in whatever recommendation I make about AI. And so I am personally right now, very involved trying to push the limits with my own, everything that I'm doing myself in my business. And it doesn't always make things calmer, unfortunately not yet, but some things have gotten a lot easier and it's been really fun for me to explore that. Just push the limits what's possible at the moment.

Yeah. One of my favorite pieces about new technology is the ability to learn and play around with it. And I think I was relatively early to the automation space. My business actually started as a no code software implementation. So very early days where Zapier only did like 10% of the things that you were trying to automate and everything else you had to actually code API calls and that kind of thing.

But one of my favorite things about learning new technology is just you get to play around with it and you get to see what you can have this thing do and how powerful it can be. I, like you, am interested to see how it proceeds. I have some reservations about the ethical implications of AI and the impact on the climate of hammering Chad GPT all day long. But I think it has a lot of really interesting potential, especially for really small businesses where they don't have the budget to hire a whole staff to do, you know, they're wearing all of the hats. I think it's an interesting direction that we're heading and jury's still out.

Absolutely. You know, I am both delighted and scared at the same time with a lot of these solutions and and things that the ways we're seeing it be used and and how it evolves. But I'm remaining optimistic. I I hope it will be a force for good in the end.

I liken it a little bit to how the previous generations must have felt when the internet happened. I was too young when the internet happened to be scared by it. I was just super excited. It was just interesting and new and exciting. And I was too young to understand that like this thing was actually going to change the way we live in the world.

And it's interesting now to be old enough to see the implications of AI in a way that I didn't when the internet happened. And sometimes it does make me feel like an old fart because I'm like, this thing is going to change. It is going to change how work happens. It's going to change how we live in the world. There are major ethical and environmental implications of everybody leaning on this technology.

I am old enough now to see that like, it's probably not all gonna be good.

Yes. Yes, unfortunately. But I think that's common with tech over time. Hopefully humans will remain on the good side overall. Right?

Whether you're looking at using a simple automation tool like Zapier, building a full on custom software, or just leaning into learning how to effectively use AI, technology can be a really powerful tool to help build efficiency and margins in your business, and you can use those margins to help your business be calmer. It starts with having a solid process but once you have that the sky is really the limit on how you can utilize these tools. You might just start with creating a client portal where they can see the status of their project without having to send you an email. For every client that uses it, you probably save five, ten minutes per email. But let's say you wanna be proactive about this.

So instead of sending three progress emails and having a live status meeting, you just use the portal plus maybe an automated email. Well, that's probably sixty to ninety minutes per client that you're saving. And if you have 15 clients, that's actually like fifteen to twenty hours that you just saved yourself and them. That's like half a work week. And that's just one area of your business and one process.

When you start stacking automated processes like that together, that can have a really major impact, not just on your capacity and your time margins. So let's think about the actual process behind this automation. We're really talking about just updating the client on the status of their project. That seems pretty straightforward. But in actuality, that's a whole bunch of micro decisions, micro actions that need to be taken.

And it's not just about the time it takes. It's actually the weight of those in your brain. You have to set a calendar reminder or a repeating task to remind you to update the client. You have to go update yourself on the status of the project first. So maybe you have to dig into your own project management system to remind yourself of where the project stands so you know what to write in the email.

Then you have to draft an email to the client with that information. And it seems simple, but even just having to remember to do it carries a weight. Automated processes aren't just great for saving time. They lift the weight of those decisions. They allow you to let go of having to remember to do those things or having to create a system so that you do remember.

That's where it feels calmer. You get both time and brain space. If you're interested in exploring how software tools and automation might help you build some margin in your business or you wanna go ahead and set up some of the systems we've been talking about, I can help. If you wanna find out more about how we could work together, you could check out my services guide at the link in the show notes or at beyondmargins.com/services. It has all the details about how I work, pricing, and the kinds of problems we can solve together.

Thanks for listening, and until next time, stay calm.